How is the Marion Dufresne organized in order to become a laboratory of scientific research?

26.07.2017 | Corporate philanthropy

The scientists of the Southern Ocean Mission will welcome you onboard the Marion Dufresne once a week during a webseries of 9 episodes, available on universcience.tv. In this fourth episode, life on the ship runs its course and Stéphane Blain’s team attends to the analysis of the first samples collected and carried onboard.

Previoulsy…

In October 2016, the scientists of the SOCLIM mission embarked on the Marion Dufresne. Their goal? Collect unprecedented data on the Southern Ocean in order to better understand the oceans’ role in the actual context of climate change.

Stéphane Blain’s teams start their journey towards the South Pole after preparing all the equipment on board. The crew hurries to prepare the gear and proceeds to the deployment of the instruments which will carry out the first samples. The researchers are preparing to go “water fishing”.

Episode #4 – The Marion Dufresne, a floating laboratory

What happens to the CO² absorbed by the Southern Ocean, what are the CO² storing mechanisms, which role does phytoplankton play in the transformation process of CO² in the ocean? How are the scientists’ days organized around these many analyses? Find out the answers to all these questions in the latest episode of the webseries.

During the entire SOCLIM mission, the oceanographers collected and analyzed samples of ocean water. But it’s not an easy task to practice science onboard a laboratory-ship! Don't forget to activate subtitles

“ The waters of the Southern Ocean are special concerning the confinement of biological carbon, they don’t function like in the other oceans at all. In other oceans, what you can generally observe is the more phytoplankton produces, the more an important part of this stock of particles drops to the bottom of the ocean. In the Southern Ocean, the relation is completely inverted.”